


As the air begins to cool

by nitorisource



Series: ☂ SouMako Week ☂ [1]
Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Family, Alternate Universe - Future Fish, Angst, M/M, SouMako Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-13
Updated: 2014-10-13
Packaged: 2018-02-20 23:58:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2447825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nitorisource/pseuds/nitorisource
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sousuke and Makoto are happily married, with a son that takes after Makoto and a daughter that takes after Sousuke.</p><p>It's definitely raining today.</p><p>Day 1: Fluff / <b>Angst</b></p>
            </blockquote>





	As the air begins to cool

**Author's Note:**

> i was like, angst???? what's the first sad thing i think of??? what 's teh firs--  
> anyway, this is sappy
> 
>  **EDIT** : _[listen to this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNSANi3Hl00)_ at the same time  (TωT;)

_"Hey, Sousuke, you've got a call."_

_"Really?" He had just been about to leave to patrol the city for a few hours, but he returned to the office and removed his hat as he was handed the receiver. "Hello?"_

_"Mr. Yamazaki." Ah, Sousuke had heard this voice before. More than once in the past school year, his son's office had called both he and Makoto to relay his troublesome behavior, which was usually nothing more than minor transgressions - however, they never called him while at work, so this was strange. He pinched the bridge of his nose as he waited to hear whatever his son was responsible for today. "Your son is waiting to be picked up from school."_

_"... What?"_

_He glanced up at the wall clock and realized that school ended well over an hour ago. They should all have been home by now._

* * *

 

 _How long have we been sitting here?_ Sousuke thinks to himself as rain cascades down around him and soaks straight through his only good suit. He promised Rin he’d leave early, but he can’t find it in himself to move from where he’s crouched down on the freshly turned grass, even as the skies darken over the heavy gray clouds.

“Papa?” comes a small voice beside him.

“You should go back to the car, kiddo.” He turns and forces out a weak smile at the tiny boy mimicking his position beside him, crouched under a black umbrella.

“But I don’t want to leave Papa,” he says with that trademark adamancy of his.

“You’ll get sick, you know.”

“Papa’s the one that’ll get sick. You’re all wet.” The little boy scrunches up his nose at the way water drips from the ends of Sousuke’s sleeves and eyelashes, and how it plasters his black hair all over his forehead. Although the boy himself hated the trouble of bringing umbrellas to school and instead loved the feel of rain, he also didn’t like the way Makoto scolded them when Sousuke came back with the two of them dripping wet from head to toe. He tightened his small hands around the handle of the umbrella while his lips turned down in a pout.

“Well, you’ve got me there, Ayato.” Sousuke turns his eyes to the ground and allows his smile to fade away again. Every few moments, he tries to steel himself to get up, but the weight in twisting in his chest and stomach chases that determination away time and time again, leaving him breathless under the ache.

“Is… is Papa crying?”

“Nah. ‘S just the rain,” Sousuke says, making no move to wipe at his overflowing eyes. Makoto’d be crestfallen to see him like this; they promised that tears just wouldn’t do if anything happened to either of them, and Sousuke is sure that Makoto would have been the one to uphold their agreement.

Ayato lets out a small huff, unconvinced, but he says nothing else and turns to face the gravestone in front of them.

“How come… they put Daddy in the ground?” Ayato’s voice is hardly above a whisper as he speaks, and the question is nearly lost amid the pounding rain. For a few moments, Sousuke thinks he can get away with not answering, because if he wasn’t already broken, that tiny, quiet sentence makes Sousuke hurt in a thousand more ways than before.

All throughout the funeral Ayato was rather quiet and solemn, unlike his usual self, probably unaware of what the ceremony was for. He was surrounded by tearful - in Rin’s case, flatout sobbing - adults, yet he simply looked on with wide eyes at the hills and grass of the vast cemetery when the rain began halfway through.

Ever since the news, Sousuke did wonder when he’d have to start explaining, but he can’t imagine where to start right now

“Daddy’s asleep,” he answers in a choked voice. That’s a terrible way of sugar coating it and Sousuke cringes as soon as the shaky words leave his mouth.

“So he’ll wake up soon?” Ayato asks with the most painful hint of hope in his voice. Sousuke can’t think of anything more to say. He himself does not want to believe in the finality of death, so there’s no hope of him explaining it to a child.

Sousuke tilts his head up towards the sky and shuts his eyes as he feels the thrum of raindrops against his eyelids. Hot tears leak down the side of his face alongside the cold drops, and his brows furrow together as a sob starts to build in his throat.

Wake up soon?

Was that what Ayato was wondering when he tiptoed to take a look at the body in the coffin, the body that looked calm as his Daddy always was?

“We should get out of here. Kazue is waiting at Uncle Haru’s.” There’s no hiding the pained trembling to his voice as the tears continue to stream down his face, and just as he forces his eyes open, he lets out a small ‘“oof” when he’s softly thrown sideways. The umbrella falls noiselessly to the ground, the canvas top of it rocking forward and touching the gravestone.

“Papa? You really are crying. You’re a liar, papa,” Ayato tells him in his most chastising tone, tightening his thin arms around his father’s neck while he buries his face into the wet fabric of the suit.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Sousuke says, a weak laugh rumbling from his chest at Ayato’s chastising-Makoto-like tone. “I’ll stop now, I promise.” He laughs again when Ayato pulls away and clumsily attempts to wipe at his father’s damp, warm cheeks but succeeds only in ineffectively streaking rainwater all over. “Hey - hey, what are you doing getting all teary-eyed on me, Ayato?”

“What?” Ayato steps back and pouts as he brings one of his hands up to his eyes where, lo and behold, fat tears are welling up at the corners. Despite that, his brows cinch together and he states huffily, “I’m not crying. I’m not.”

Sousuke gingerly reaches out to take his son into his arms, and as soon as Ayato’s face nuzzles once more against his chest, he feels the tiny body shudder and tremble with stifled weeping. Even if he isn’t sure what it means to have his father dead, or passed away, or moved on, as so many people have told him, the weight and ache of the situation seems to have finally caught up with the child. A part of him seems to know that his father won’t be coming back.

“Sousuke? You’re crying,” Makoto told him in a soft voice, placing a hand on his husband’s shoulder. Cradled in his arms was a tiny child - their first child - finally worn out from crying and crying. Sousuke hadn’t wanted to hold him until Ayato stopped weeping, and now it seemed as though he had no intent of ever letting him down.

“No, I’m not,” Sousuke snapped back, though not too loudly. Ayato stirred and his verdant eyes blinked open. He took one look at the person holding him and quickly burst back into hysteric bawling, until Makoto finally coaxed Sousuke into giving the child back to him.

Just a short, blissful seven years later and Ayato is crying again in his arms, asking him, “How will Daddy get out if he’s underground like this? He has to wake up. He’s coming home too, isn’t he?”

Sousuke tightens his arms around his son as he rests his chin on the wet, messy head of dark-brown hair. “Not today, Daddy can’t come home today. He’s going to be gone from now on, okay? He’s going to be gone for a long time.”

* * *

Rin makes a lot of angry noise about how irresponsible Sousuke is for allowing both his fancy suit and his own son to get so thoroughly drenched in the rain, and while he takes his favorite nephew upstairs to get him changed, Sousuke heads straight for Haruka’s room.

There’s no need to knock, it seems. The door is wide open and Haruka is perched on the end of his bed with the bundled up little girl in his arms, and he glances up as soon as he hears the heavy footsteps coming down the hall. He raises his brows somewhat at Sousuke’s appearance and is probably noting the soggy steps the taller man has tracked into his home, but instead he says nothing and glances back down at Kazue.

“Thanks for watching her,” Sousuke says quietly, still paused outside the door.

“Yeah,” Haruka answers, just as quietly. After a few more moments, he stands and walks to the door, looking as though he’s going to hand the child off, but instead he shakes his head and nods in the direction of the closet. “You have to change, first.”

Sousuke lets out a tired sigh as he obligingly removes his soaked coat and drapes it over the back of a chair. He unbuttons the cuffs of his longsleeve so that he can roll the sleeves up, and he runs a cold, shaking hand through his wet hair.

“She looks a lot like you.”

“Yeah, well, I am her biological father.” Haru’s seen the kid intermittently for the past two years so Sousuke isn’t sure why he makes a note of the family resemblance now of all times. He opens the closet and throws a look over his shoulder as though to validate the appearance of his daughter despite having spent so much time looking after her. Her hair is as coarse and as black as his, and Rin joked often about how they had the same long, dumb nose. Underneath her closed lids were eyes the exact same shade of teal as his own, and as Sousuke’s own father. They even drooped down and lit up the same way whenever she smiled wide or laughed loudly enough.

Haru pauses, his gaze never leaving Kazue’s calm face.

Truth be told, he was rather adverse to the prospect of taking care of the little girl on his off days from training as though the infant somehow housed part of Sousuke’s infuriating demeanor, which left him utterly unprepared for just how much he would end up enjoying taking care of her. On the nights Makoto came back to pick her up, Haruka would even distract him with food and pastries as they spoke for hours, all while Kazue remained in his arms. Makoto knew what he was doing, and knew that Haruka was just too shy to admit how attached he’d become, so he never minded, especially after he and Rin returned to Tokyo from their occasional weeks spent training overseas.

“But she’s like Makoto. Her gentleness. And she never cries.”

Sousuke lets out a short laugh as he continues to rummage through the drawer for anything that will even remotely fit him. Much of Rin’s and Haru’s clothes are jumbled together, a result of Rin crashing at Haru’s whenever they were in town, and Sousuke’s sure that he’s left a jacket or two somewhere in this house. Haruka’s is always the prime place for them to gather, especially since Kazue was born. “Yeah. Makoto cried often as a kid, though, didn’t he?”

“When Ren and Ran were born, he stopped, though. I don’t think he cried again after that. Not in front of other people, at least,” he says thoughtfully.

Suddenly, Sousuke doesn’t like where this conversation is headed. He doesn’t need to be reminded of how heartbroken the Tachibana family was at the funeral. Ren and Ran were the first Sousuke relayed the news to, and try as little grown-up Ren might, he couldn’t stop himself from clinging onto Sousuke and sobbing as soon as he processed the words. Ran was a little more stoic, but before Sousuke left, she ended up pulling both of them together while she quietly wept and muttered her older brother’s name. It had been a long time since Makoto last visited home, since his job in the city and as a father was so demanding. Just as the image of Makoto’s mother doubling over in tears surfaces to his mind, Haruka speaks up again.

“Make sure Kazue doesn’t forget him.”

Sousuke stills. Somehow, lost in the very back of the drawer, is one of Makoto’s jackets. Light and forest green colored. Haruka notices as he peers over Sousuke’s shoulder, and his expression taints almost unnoticeably with pain. If Sousuke was looking close enough, he would have noticed how red-rimmed and puffy Haruka’s eyes have been ever since the start of the funeral that afternoon.

Down the hall, they can hear Ayato’s quick footsteps down the stairs as Rin hollers after him not to run, and the loud pair moves to the kitchen so they can start to go through the fridge in hopes of finding one of the deserts Uncle Haruka makes. Ayato laughs loudly at something Rin says, and the sound of it bounces through the entire house.

“I’ll make sure she doesn’t, of course,” Sousuke answers a little too sharply. He stuffs the jacket back into the drawer - now a disorganized mess that Rin will lament over later - and shuts it. There, in the bottom drawer, is the jacket he was looking for. He hastily pulls it over his wet dress shirt and zips up the front.

“Good,” is all that Haru has left to say.

Haruka reluctantly hands Kazue back to Sousuke, who gratefully cradles the child against his chest and revels in her warmth. He’s not sure how Haru so easily voiced one of the many concerns that Sousuke has had in the past few days - specifically, how he’s afraid of how to raise his children without Makoto. And he’s afraid that since their daughter lost Makoto at hardly three years old, she’ll come to forget him.

Makoto had been so elated to hear the news that their second child would be a girl. He really ended up coddling their little girl whenever he could, and always took too long to say goodbye to her during the mornings after he was able to spend at home. When Sousuke thinks of that now, the excited words and kisses Makoto gave the sleepy child those days--

They both leave the room and stop in their tracks at the sight of Ayato with frosting smeared across the kitchen table and over a sleeping Rin’s cheeks and hair. Haruka promptly lifts the child off the counter and holds his sugar-covered hand as they walk to the sink, while Sousuke nudges Rin’s shoulder with his free hand.

“Ah - ah, huh?” He clambers into an upright position and nearly falls off his chair. “Oh - oh, are we all leaving, already?” Rin’s had as hard and long a day as any of them, and was the one who aided Sousuke the most in planning the details of the funeral. He was also the one most hard-pressed not to cry throughout the ceremony, but Ayato did quick work out of anyone holding their tears in whenever he went to hold their hands.

“Yeah. Tomorrow, I need to start looking for someone to watch the kids while I’m at work.” Not to mention finding someone accommodating enough to bring Ayato to and from school, to help him with homework, to cook them meals, and to watch over a toddler.

“That’s right, that’s right,” Rin says, scratching the back of his head and looking very confused when he touched the frosting. A sleepy smile settles on his lips as he casts a sidelong glance at the perpetrator, and he says, “For now, they’re welcome here. Haru won’t mind. And we won’t be leaving again for at least three weeks.”

“Thanks, Rin.”

Whatever Rin needs to say to him has already been said, and instead he offers another tired, consoling smile while they wait for Ayato to wash up. Once they’re all ready, Rin and Haru walk the family outside under umbrellas, the rain reduced to nothing more than a light drizzle by now. The clouds have retreated enough that the moon visibly lights the path from the home to the car.

“Get home safely,” Haru says absentmindedly, as Sousuke buckles in Ayato, who is drowsily nodding off. On the other side of the car, Rin clips Kazue into her carseat before getting into the passenger seat.

“Yeah. Thank again for everything. I’ll see you soon.”

* * *

Instead of putting her into her shared room with Ayato, Sousuke tucks her beneath the heavy covers of the bed in the master bedroom. She’s absolutely tiny on the large mattress, and he quickly showers and changes into comfortable clothes to finally get some decent sleep. He carefully slips beneath the blankets as well and adjusts his daughter so that he’s resting her head against Sousuke’s bicep, and she mumbles a little and curls tighter into his side.

He smiles faintly at her as her breathing settles and slows again before reaching back and turning the light off. He hoped earlier for sleep to hit him quickly, but he keeps his eyes open as his vision adjusts to the dark of such a familiar room.

Even if he’s spent plenty of nights alone, when Makoto had to work late, it’s different trying to drift off with the heavy, almost surreal knowledge that this is how every night will be from now on. Without Makoto, it’s far from the same. Far from welcoming, far from warm. Without Makoto on the other end of the bed, without him completing their small safety nest around their daughter…

The door creaks open and Sousuke looks back as Ayato quietly pads up to his side of the bed, rubbing his eye with one hand and holding his stuffed animal in the other.

“I want to sleep here, too,” Ayato says. His voice is shaking slightly, and Sousuke can’t see clearly in the dark but he thinks his son is crying again. For the past few nights, Kazue has slept in the same room, but Ayato never said a word about sleeping on his own. Sousuke assumed he still didn’t need that kind of attention of comfort.

“Sure thing, Do you want to sleep on this side?”

Ayato shakes his head and makes his way to the other side. “Is it okay if I sleep on Daddy’s side?” he asks as he already starts to lift the covers.

“Of course,” Sousuke tells him. Ayato shifts for a few moments under the blankets but eventually settles on laying one arm gently over his sister, with his stuffed animal tucked between them. Within moments, he’s out cold too, leaving the small tears at the corners of his eyes to dry on their own.

The rest of their apartment feels vastly emptier now that its three tenants are huddled up on the same bed like this. Sousuke can’t recall the last time the four of them were able to fit in the room like this together. By the time Kazue was born, Ayato was already beginning to make known his independent attitude and was happy to get his own little twin-sized bed.

* * *

_The alarm hadn’t gone off yet but Sousuke was already wide awake, and when he heard Makoto beginning to shift and murmur from where he was wrapped up in his arms, he shut his eyes and started to feign sleep again. The brunet yawned lightly and turned over. Sousuke had to fight the urge to smile at the way Makoto regarded him sleeping, the way Sousuke had caught him doing a few times already. There was nothing quite like the loving, unfading expression Makoto had in the morning._

_When Sousuke cracked one eye open, Makoto quickly glanced away, his face already tinging with blush. Their tenth wedding anniversary was on its way and yet Makoto still acted like a blushing newlywed from time to time, which made Sousuke laugh as he stretched his arms out before again settling them around Makoto._

_They were quiet for a few moments before Makoto piped up, “We should probably wake Ayato up. You know how long he spends in the tub each morning.” He tried to move the blanket from his body but Sousuke simply tightened his embrace over his husband’s waist._

_“Not yet. I promise I’ll get him to school on time today.” He nuzzled into the crook of Makoto’s neck and smiled at the low rumble of laughter he elicited._

_“Fine, fine. A few more minutes then,” Makoto said, reaching back to switch the impending alarm off. He turned beneath the blankets and Sousuke’s arms until they were face to face, and he reached up to rest a warm hand on the sleepy man’s cheek. “Kazue, too. You have to drop her off at Haru’s before Rin gets there. And I still have to cut the fruit for her--”_

_Sousuke let out an exaggerated, comical grown as he turned to lay onto his back and rested the back of his hand over his forehead. “Yes, sir! Orders are understood.”_

_“Hey, hey,” Makoto whined. He pulled his husband back until he had Sousuke nestled in his embrace with his head leaning against Makoto’s shoulder. His expression softened while he paused and took a few moments to just look at Sousuke. It was something he hadn’t done in too long, in between their schedules and exhausted nights. “What time are you coming home tonight?”_

_“I get off early today,” Sousuke told him, a lazy grin on his lips._

_“Good. Then I’ll be waiting for you.” Makoto pressed his lips against Sousuke’s forehead before letting out a blissful sigh and shutting his eyes again. “A few more minutes before I leave for work.” His hand reached up to twine in Sousuke’s hair._

_“You’re getting off at noon from the fire station, right?” Sousuke asked. His free hand easily fit in Makoto’s between them._

_“Mhm. I’ll let Haru know that I’ll be the one to pick Ayato up from school today.”_

 

 


End file.
